The day after we received our approved applications, a very special package arrived for us straight from the North Pole! We had NO idea what it could be.

After tearing it open, they peeked inside to find:

*A letter from Santa

*Our Elf on the Shelf with his book

*A magic elf key

*Christmas Lists for the students to complete and mail to the North Pole

We opened and read the letter first. They were getting ridiculously excited at this point.

After reading the letter and seeing all of the wonderful things Santa sent us, we read the Elf on the Shelf book. Many of the kids hadn't heard of Elf on the Shelf before, which surprised me! After the story it was time to name our Elf. We made a graph on the SmartBoard. We started by having each child choose a name. We wrote those on the board and then narrowed them down to 4 choices through a vote. The final 4 choices were: Zippy, Snowy, Elfy, and Snowflake. After the long voting process, we finally chose "Snowflake"! There was a bit of conflict about it because he is a boy and Snowflake is a girl name apparently, but in the end we decided that it doesn't matter because Snowflakes can be boys or girls. I realize this doesn't make sense, but I was using 5 year old logic here and it worked for them :)

The next day, the kids came in to find Snowflake dangling from our document camera. He brought some special treats with him as well! He brought us the Elf on the Shelf movie - "An Elf's Story", cookies from the North Pole Bakery, milk, and a note.

I am so proud of those labels for the cookies :) You can snag the label and note for FREE by clicking the picture below:

We ate our yummy treats and watched the movie from Snowflake!

At the end of the day, we filled out our Elf Adventure Log. Each day the kids write about where they found Snowflake and draw a little picture. They did a pretty amazing job! To use this with your class click HERE.

On Friday, Snowflake left us with quite a mess. He toilet papered the Christmas tree! YIKES! The kids were laughing ridiculously hard at this. I even had kids from other classes peeking in.

Sitting on his throne of destruction was Snowflake, with his sneaky smile.

You may have noticed the Snowflake is holding a key in each of his pictures. I created this fun little idea to help explain how Snowflake gets in and out of our room each night. You can grab your copy of this FREEBIE by clicking HERE.

And there we have it! Our first week of elftastic adventures! For a sneak peek of things to come, you can download my free Elf on the Shelf planning calendar below!

Hope you are having a wonderful week... and I hope your kids aren't too CRAZY! XO

5 comments:

I came across your website via pinterest because I am planning my son's 1st birthday which is circus themed and I am going to use your circus snack idea. However, I HAD to comment on how amazingly awesome of a teacher you are. I am a teacher as well (adults) and I hope to some day be with the little ones like you! I love how you involve your students in such fun, engaging & educational lessons. I only can hope and pray that someday my son will have a teacher like you and that I can be as creative as you are! :)